Happy St. Patty’s Day!

I hope everyone who was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day was able to not only have fun but stay safe doing so. Of course, when there is drinking associated with a holiday it can be easy to get carried away. It’s always a great idea to have driving arrangements or the option to sleep at a friend’s place set up before you head out to celebrate.

This year I was able to celebrate with a handful of my university friends that I don’t get to see as often as I’d like. I haven’t been drinking much at all now for nearly half a year, so I stuck to my one Irish coffee to meet my liquor allowance. We all had a blast discussing where our lives have taken us so far, and it’s great to see everyone doing so well. I was excited to hear that more people are hoping to relocate into or closer to Waterloo!

Happy (belated) St. Patty’s Day everyone, and I hope the recovery has gone smoothly today.

Articles

Empower Your Visionaries: Steve Faktor talks to us about who the visionaries are in your company and why you should be empowering them. Steve says that the visionaries within our organizations are frustrated by bureaucracy and will often leave to go start their own Next-Big-Thing. So what should we be doing with them? What can we do with them? Well… challenge them! Challenge them to make their radical ideas a reality. Extend the boundaries you’ve placed on them so that they can try to make their vision a reality and make them feel comfortable with the possibility of failure. Wouldn’t it be great if they’re next big thing was the next big thing for your organization?

Don’t Forget Me! Ensuring Distributed Team Members Aren’t Left Out: In this article, Gary Swart touches on how to make sure remote employees are kept engaged. Working remotely can be difficult not only for the person offsite, but for the people that are supposed to interface with the person offsite. Timezone differences, cultural differences (i.e. different holidays, for example), and the fact that you can’t interact in person are all things that make remote team members a lot trickier to work with. Gary suggests using the ICE (Identify, Clarify, and Extend) principle, which he outlines in his post. He also suggests using things like video conferencing so that you can pick up more on body language when you’re meeting remotely and even ensuring that you try to keep your technology homogeneous so that information can be shared easily.

Inspire Creativity at Work With All 5 of Your Senses: A good friend of mine shared this with me the other day, and I thought it was worth passing along. Many people don’t pay attention to it, but if you work a traditional office job, you spend a lot of time in the office. Even if you can get a little boost from your environment, it can potentially go a long way over time. This mashable is an infographic about how different colors and ambience in the office can be used to enhance (or restrict) different aspects of your thinking and interaction. If your work environment isn’t playing into your senses, you may be missing out on a positive effect!

Great leaders aren’t afraid to take risks: According to Alex Malley, risk taking is a very important part of leadership. He has a handful of suggestions for gearing yourself up for taking risks in your leadership role such as separating the personal aspect of failure from your role. If you’ve set yourself up with talented people, you have open communication with your manager, and you’re prepared for the “worst case”, then you should feel more comfortable taking risks.

The complete guide to listening to music at work: I’ve personally given up on listening to music at work during core hours due to the nature of my role (I’ve been told this is “humblebragging“, but realistically I’m just making myself more approachable). However, when I’m cranking through some development work on my own and I know I’m not going to be approached by anyone, I love to turn up some tunes. I thought Adam Pasick had a pretty cool write up about the different aspects of listening to music at work. Essentially, different styles of music may be better for different tasks at work. I think it’s worth a read if one of the first things you do when you get into the office is strap on your headphones!

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Just a quick one here because I’m hoping it will benefit a person or two. I’d like to start by stating I’ve always been a Windows user. I don’t like using Macs and I don’t like using *nix. Why? It’s just my preference, and I’ll leave it at that (I don’t have an emotional attachment to Microsoft or anything, I’m just well versed with Windows). Anyway… I was recently trying to get a Google Code page setup for one of the postings I wrote. However, being a Windows user made things pretty difficult. Here’s how I solved my problem:

Install GitExtensions (I already had this installed, because I use this for everything)

But why?! I’m pushing to origin! Well, that’s exactly why. ‘origin’ in my case refers to the repository I have on a different server–NOT where google code is! What did I do next then? Googled like mad until I got to here. Thank you StackOverflow, yet again.

Next steps:

From git extensions, launch the bash window. And yes, believe me… I get super nervous as soon as I have to use the console I’m unfamiliar with.

And the rest is history! The two commands simply added a “remote” called googlecode and then pushed my branch up to the googlecode remote.

It was actually an extremely simple solution, I just wasn’t paying attention to what exactly was wrong. I figured by cloning the repo initially it knew where the correct remote was. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

I work as a team lead of software engineering at Magnet Forensics (http://www.magnetforensics.com). I'm into powerlifting, bodybuilding, and blogging about leadership/development topics over at http://www.devleader.ca.